I understand your argument, but I very much doubt that it would fly in court.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to argue that anything should "fly in court". All I was trying to explain originally is that I don't think Google should get a free pass compared to Microsoft just because they don't use proprietary file formats in predatory way, because when you're talking about cloud services there are (possibly natural rather than deliberate) barriers to competition that effectively create similar momentum anyway.
I do also happen to think that Google's position is dominant in several markets today, and as such they are getting into legal monopoly territory, and as such they are at risk of being considered anti-competitive if they don't tread very carefully. But as you say, each of those points is distinct and doesn't automatically follow from the one before. In this thread, all I'm saying is that the OP's comments way back at the beginning were an apples-to-oranges comparison and don't preclude the possibility of a similar monopoly abuse situation either.
Or maybe I just have a different opinion to you. Apparently my views in this thread are controversial, but obviously I'm not the only one to hold them: there have been both considered replies and positive moderations of several of my posts, as well as the critics.
I would point out (yet again) that most of the people writing critical responses aren't actually addressing the point I've been trying to make anyway, they're attacking some vaguely related strawman. The fact is that no-one has commented in detail on the two specific cases I mentioned right back in my very first post to this thread: transferring data not just out of Google Docs but also into a competing on-line service, and transferring data not just out of Google Mail but also into a competing service (specifically, Hotmail). The best I've had is lots of claims that I must be [insert insult here] because I don't know how easy it is to get data out of Google's software (a position I never opposed or challenged, but which doesn't contradict my original point).
Still, at least the people who want an argument now seem to have nothing left except calling me names like "professional Google hater" (despite repeated and explicit comments throughout this discussion that I'm not criticising Google, I'm merely pointing out that in practice they currently have a dominant position in several markets) and "shill" (for who, exactly?).
John and Jane would ask me/you/another geek how to do it and I would show them.
They could do that. Most of them won't do that. And since we're talking about monopolies, it's the actual market share we should look at first, not the theoretical possibility that people could move. People could theoretically have moved from PCs running Windows to Apple gear running MacOS, or for that matter could have downloaded another browser instead of sticking with IE, but most of them didn't.
What do you think Google should do?
I don't think that Google should do anything. I think Google's position on its mail service and the facilities it provides to let people download their mail are exemplary. This does not change the fact that right now they have a large market share.
Is Safari a Google product? No. Are Apple likely to help Google become dominant? LOL.
Hang on, you're moving the goalposts again. The concern here was about whether WebKit-specific extensions could potentially become so common that other browsers had a competitive disadvantage by not supporting them, much as IE6 once did. It's not a Google vs. Apple issue.
Don't try to wave the "I'm an IT professional" shite at me. I'm an IT professional too, with probably a great deal more experience than you.
I have no interest in going down this path with you. I didn't wave anything like that at you. I commented on two specific points, where I believed based entirely on what you have written here and I continue to believe that either your understanding of the reality is wrong or you're not understanding the points I'm trying to make.
One final time, and then I'm giving up: Google do, in practice, have a dominant position in several potentially related markets. Whether or not they are behaving in any way inappropriately in terms of locking people in, this potentially gives them monopoly status. This is a matter of statute law, and one judge's findings in one particular case in one particular jurisdiction do not limit the scope of the issue, even if it was a very significant case at the time. Google are also in a position where some of the technologies they support that are not industry-wide standards could become de facto standards just as various Microsoft technologies did back in the day. Again, there is nothing inherently illegal about that, but the potential consequences are similar. If Google use their current dominant position in certain markets to unfairly promote those technologies they favour in other markets, that is where the legal problems start for them.
There are some issues with this approach, but it's certainly far more democratic then various representative democratic systems we currently have in the West.
The question, of course, is whether we really want a true democracy.
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." -- Winston Churchill
If you could have an idealised system where (a) anyone who cared enough to get properly informed on an issue and develop a considered opinion had earned the right to vote on that issue, (b) any time an issue required significant debate there was magically a freely available forum to host that debate, and (c) enough money grew on trees to pay for anyone interested in a particular subject to spend their time getting informed and debating about it before voting, then sure, I could buy into that.
In practice, since we can never have such a system, I think some form of representative democracy is the best we can achieve. However, we could do a lot better than we do in most places today at keeping those representatives honest. We could start by mandating a right to force a referendum on any single issue, removing the problem where someone who the population mostly agree with can push through other measures once elected even if the population as a whole is strongly opposed to those measures, for example because it gains the representative favour with powerful special interests. Then introduce a power of recall, removing the problem that politicians only need to care about the people they supposedly represent within a memory span of an election cycle, and we'd really be getting somewhere.
If you're going to take advantage of modern technology's ability to organise mass consultation far more easily and cheaply than before, I would suggest measures like these rather than anything resembling literal direct democracy on all matters. Use the Internet to run a consultation day, perhaps annually or even semiannually, so that the elected representatives still have a reasonable period of time to explore an issue and propose their response, but the general population can contribute to or even override big decisions frequently enough that they can't be ignored.
Sure, Facebook are trying to spy on everyone everywhere. They just don't actually run ads on sites other than their own is what I'm saying, at least not in the way that Google does.
In theory, yes you can. In practice, with the major providers today, the Web is full of people complaining that it doesn't work in the Google -> Hotmail case I mentioned when you have lots of data, as obviously a lot of people do with an e-mail archive.
I am now repeating this every post because so many people (though not the parent poster) keep replying to half of what I've written and ignoring the context: I am not accusing Google of being sneaky or trying to lock up data through technical means here. I am simply observing, in response to someone else's original point about file formats, that Google don't need to rely on proprietary file formats or other lock-in techniques to keep people hooked if in practice most people aren't going to be able to shift their data to a competing service anyway. You don't get exempted from monopoly status just because of a theoretical ability for your users to switch to a competitor, if in practice you still hold the dominant market share.
That comment alone sums up almost all of the replies to my original comments. To a geek using Slashdot, no, it's not hard to shift the data around. But if you think John and Jane down the road are going to have the slightest idea about how to follow those instructions and the confidence to actually do it, I think you need to spend a bit more time in front line customer support at an ISP.
As I keep saying, it isn't Google's fault, and they aren't being unreasonable, but that doesn't matter. The point is that they don't need to use proprietary technologies to lock people in if in practice most people won't manage to switch anyway.
Webkit is not without competition even on mobile devices
You also need to spend a bit more time as a developer of web sites aimed at mobile devices. Safari is utterly dominant on iOS devices. Chrome is utterly dominant on Android devices. Everything else is noise. It is possible that this will change with the arrival of Windows 8 and a new version of IE both aimed squarely at the mobile device market, but right now that is the reality. Firefox is a blip. IE is a blip. Whatever BlackBerry are running this week is a blip, albeit one with occasional spikes on B2B sites. Safari and Chrome are dominant, utterly.
I haven't glossed over SPDY at all but looking at it it appears to be an attempt at a replacement for HTTP and TCP. I don't see the one Google web server to rule them all anywhere.
No-one saw IE6 becoming one browser to rule them all either, until it won enough market share that people started using IE6-only features, which in turn became a liability a few years later as other browsers started trying to compete seriously again. This is a prime example where Google are influential enough in multiple markets (in this case, browser software and on-line applications) to push through their own standards at the expense of others.
Do you actually expect Google to make their system export in every possible format to every online suite on the internet?
No, of course not. Google are under no legal obligation to provide any sort of export facility at all, as far as I'm aware.
However, I cannot help but notice the irony here: I am challenging a claim -- that Google is somehow less monopolistic than Microsoft were because Google aren't relying on proprietary file formats in the same way -- and I am being criticised in part on the basis that Google can export the data in the very same proprietary format that was apparently grounds for attacking Microsoft originally!
What other Webmail service provides an easy "transfer my stuff to Gmail" feature? IMAP and POP3 are the standard ways to transfer email, and Gmail offering those is better than the other services already!
IMAP and POP are protocols that a lot of people using Google Mail have never even heard of, because one of the major advantages of signing up for hosted webmail is that you don't have to configure this sort of stuff.
It's great that Google Mail lets you download your stuff to archive it or whatever, really it is. But if you (meaning "an average user", not you personally) can't easily transfer your data to a rival service, using those protocols or otherwise, then there is a barrier to competition.
Please understand that it doesn't matter whose fault this is, and that I'm not blaming Google as if they're somehow letting the side down. I'm simply arguing that such a barrier exists, and is the modern cloud-based equivalent of everyone's software using their own proprietary file formats in the old days.
That in turn makes it difficult to move between competing services, and that gives an advantage to whoever has the lion's share of the market at any given time, and that means they have a mechanism they can lever to their advantage in other markets, and fundamentally that is what this whole discussion is about. It's not an opinion or a criticism, it's simply the way things are, just as being a monopoly is not illegal, but it does activate a different set of rules to prevent the abuse of that dominant position.
It may well be. I've never claimed otherwise, despite some respondents apparently reading things into my posts that were not there.
But it doesn't matter. The question was whether Google use locked-in proprietary formats in the way Microsoft used to. My point is that it doesn't matter, because as long as there are barriers to easy competition, and regardless of whose fault those barriers may be, Google get the benefits in terms of retention-by-default without need Microsoft-esque tricks to bolster their position.
Exporting Google Mail isn't terribly difficult. Microsoft allowing you to import it has nothing to do with Google.
Well, sure, and saving a Word document isn't terribly difficult. OpenOffice importing it all correctly has nothing to do with Microsoft.
Of course it's not that simple because you get into questions of how open the formats used are and so on. But your argument is weak as it stands.
Putting their stuff in their browser when they have 2 other major competitors has nothing on driving all other browsers out of the market and imposing a non-standard browser that set the web back a few years.
Except that on mobile devices, WebKit is already the only serious game in town, and on Windows Chrome's market share is rising rapidly while Firefox stagnates and IE drops like a stone. It is entirely conceivable that at currents rates Chrome will not have "2 other major competitors" within a couple of years, and web developers will be treating the numerous Chrome- (or at least WebKit-) specific features as standardised, just like they did with IE6 after Netscape lost.
WebM - lol you are clutching at straws aren't you. WebM has failed miserably to unseat h264
I notice that you glossed over SPDY there, and indeed over my more general point that Google are quite happy to propose entire new standards if they don't like the ones that are already there. It's not so much "embrace and extend" as "ignore and replace" in that case, but the end result is the same.
Once again, I'm not saying these proposed replacements are bad. On the contrary, there are solid technical arguments in their favour in many cases. I'm just pointing out that this is the same path that we followed before.
Google docs: File -> Download as -> Word, ODT, RDF, PDF, Text, HTML (Zipped)
I didn't ask whether you could download it as a Word DOC, I asked whether you could transfer it into another on-line office suite -- in other words, a direct competitor to Google Docs. And the short answer is no, at least not without converting via an intermediate format such as those you mentioned.
And Gmail support both POP3 and IMAP.. What else do you need?
Yes, I get it. You can download your mail, assuming you have some suitable tool that can then use it in that format.
But this doesn't help unless other competing tools actually can use it. Since you typically can't upload an entire existing mail archive to the major hosted webmail providers, it doesn't matter if you can download it from whichever one you picked first, you're still effectively locked in and there is a significant barrier to competition.
You can certainly argue that if the download lets you get some sort of standard mail archive but the other service doesn't support uploading that standard format then it's the receiving service's fault, but what is the standard format for downloading an entire archive from a hosted webmail service? Maybe with some combinations you can set up the receiving system to fetch everything via POP or IMAP from the originating system without ever downloading it locally, but how many people would even understand what that means, and how many of the major webmail providers allow this in practice?
Please remember that my fundamental point here is not to accuse Google of using proprietary formats, it's that Google don't need to use proprietary formats to achieve the same kind of lock-in if, in practice, most of their users can't figure out how to get their data into a competing service anyway.
I don't know what you mean by "enforcing", but I suspect you're asking the wrong question.
When you host all your users' data anyway, as Google services typically do, it doesn't matter all that much what format you're using to store the data internally. What matters is whether your users can readily get access to their own data and interoperate with other products/services that use that data.
Have you ever tried to get a document or spreadsheet out of Google Docs and into one of the other on-line office suites? How about exporting your entire Google Mail archive and importing it into Hotmail?
bundling products to the detriment of their competition
Well, their entire network of services just changed its privacy policy to allow them to share data everywhere, and their advertising is targeted based on the data they are collecting on all those other services, which sounds a lot like bundling services to me. I don't know about "to the detriment of their competition", because who is the serious competition to Google Ads? Even the mighty Facebook, who has a somewhat similar MO, don't run an advertising network that is widely used on other web sites.
and 'reinterpreting' standards such that third party options no longer interoperate properly?
Apart from the numerous extensions and proprietary features going into their browser, exactly like what Microsoft and Netscape did back in the day? And violating assorted technical standards for serving web sites in the interests of getting faster performance for their page loads? And then there's things like SPDY and WebM.
Of course, you could reasonably argue that this is digital evolution in action and will make the Internet a better place in the long run, but then you could have made a reasonable argument that Microsoft Office and IE6 initially won their long-term dominance by being better than their competition in much the same way. At the time they won, they were great products, too. The stagnation and ultimately the legacy burden only comes later, when there's nothing left to offer credible competition and drive innovation in the market.
Google is not yet in Microsoft's league of indecency. Microsoft, just to remind you, is a convicted abusive monopolist. Google has not reached monopoly status anywhere significant.
Google is probably at least as dominant in several on-line fields as Microsoft ever was: search (traditional Google), video hosting (YouTube), and mapping/geographical data (Google Maps) come immediately to mind. I don't know how dominant Google Mail is as a hosted webmail provider these days, but that might be a candidate too. And then there are all kinds of smaller/niche areas where Google has been developing and/or buying up early players, though the trend does seem to be much more about consolidation and focus since the change in leadership.
On top of that range of dominant services, there is far more potential for Google to use leverage from an existing dominant service to further its efforts artificially in another market, with the on-line advertising where it makes its real money being a prime example.
So I think you're objectively incorrect that Google is not yet in the same league as Microsoft were. They are actually some way beyond where Microsoft had got to, it's just that no-one has called them on it in court yet. That could simply be because there is no-one left to compete credibly and no-one new brave/foolish enough to try to disrupt a market where Google is already the dominant player, which is in practice almost the definition of a monopoly.
That's an interesting theory. It will be even more interesting to see whether it survives the French presidential election and the next major round of elections in Germany. If M. Hollande wins the presidency and makes good on his position to renegotiate the current agreements on European finances, that could be serious political trouble for Frau Merkel, who is already facing an uphill struggle at the next election. If she fails to win another term, the two big powerhouses who have driven the austerity agenda will be gone.
If that happened, they would almost certainly have been replaced by politicians far more willing to tell Big Finance where to go, if that meant they could still put food on family dining tables and books children's schools. This would no doubt worry the international community and put a dampener on future investment, but ironically there is a variation of the too-big-to-fail argument that applies to Europe as a whole: even if several countries in Europe do renege on many of their debts, we're still talking about one of the biggest markets in the first world, and if the developing economies want to keep growing at anything close to their current pace, they're going to have to trade with Europe one way or another. Sure, they might always do it with one eye on their bank accounts and the other on the trustworthy faces of European governments, but the alternative is that Europe just sits there and stagnates for -- well, who knows how long for? -- and that doesn't help either Europe itself or any of its potential trading partners.
At some point, you have to admit that the entire system was screwed up, and the best thing to do is to knock it down and build it again. Economically, there is debate about whether we have reached that point and must accept the downsides of a write-off. Politically, a change of direction in the French and German governments could render the economics a moot point.
You get copyright by default in any nation that is a signatory to the major international treaties, which is almost everywhere that is relevant to a discussion about starting tech companies. This has been the case for quite a few years now.
The question of whether that copyright prevents someone else from doing something is much more interesting, because it depends on the local exceptions that are permitted, which do vary significantly from place to place.
So, unless you want to undo almost a century of globalization, this will affect legal software worldwide, unless and until copyright laws can be amended to more sane terms.
Fortunately, that is not even close to true.
Firstly, as a matter of objective fact, there are significant discrepancies in the scope of local copyright laws in different jurisdictions, and ultimately that local law is what is going to matter in any given lawsuit. For example, in the United States, the rules for protecting the design of fonts are looser than anywhere else I know because of a specific provision. That doesn't negate the copyright on font designs elsewhere, but neither does it mean the US is going to close down all the people making cloned fonts with the blessing of a specific provision of US law.
Secondly, the major international copyright treaties explicitly allow for limitations and exceptions to copyright law that vary from country to country. For example, the United States actually has far more lenient fair use provisions than most places. Whether this is compatible with the three step test under the Berne Convention etc. is the subject of considerable debate, and such a broad and generic exception is not found on the statute books in most other western jurisdictions, but that doesn't mean things the US considers fair use are illegal if somewhere else doesn't choose to incorporate the same exception into their own law.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, plenty of countries, including the United States, have demonstrably been willing to screw the rules in the international copyright treaties and/or apply leverage based on other unrelated international agreements to further their own national interests on numerous occasions. If the US tried to enforce any such law internationally based on treaty obligations, I expect it would find itself subject to ridicule long before it found everyone else subject to its absurd precedent.
It's really not, for precisely the reasons you gave.
If this case were to go in Oracle's favour and if it were then allowed to set a precedent, the US software industry would be seriously damaged by legal infighting for a years to come. Even if a few large businesses on the scale of Google and Oracle could survive, in the same way that they play the patent pooling game to neutralise that threat from other big business while still screwing small businesses, innovation would die almost overnight and the next big software businesses would all be based outside the US. As the rest of the world looked on, bemused by the litigious culture of US business finally imploding, the total US economy would take a noticeable hit, Silicon Valley would become a historical footnote as investors fled to tech hubs in other jurisdictions, etc.
And so, if this were allowed to stand, it would suck for Google for about ten minutes, and then lobbyists backed by more money than has been printed in the history of humanity would descend on Washington and buy legislation to trump the court case and fix the problem.
Personally I find GMail to be particularly shady, because it's not only scanning the user's personal mail, it's also inherently scanning someone else's personal mail, and the other party/parties might not even realise that Google is involved in any way. Rather like Facebook's shadow profiles and getting friends to volunteer information about each other than the individuals chose not to provide themselves, there's something very dubious about Google using a database of e-mail correspondance without all of the parties agreeing to it.
As for Drive, I don't see anything in the terms that actually restricts Google to the kind of behaviour you described, for example requiring them to respect any privacy settings you might have chosen, and I suspect that's why some people are concerned about the privacy implications.
Unfortunately we seem to be following a similar path in Britain, and wider Europe, as well these days. There is still some degree of political opposition to over-reaching security provisions that conflict with civil liberties here, more so than in the US it seems, but we have the virtual strip search machines at airports and we send passenger data to US authorities and we see repeated efforts to install systematic spyware and censorship tools into communications networks and so on.
I'm hopeful that clearer heads will prevail and public sentiment will turn against the unbalanced policy before it becomes too deeply entrenched, but alas our political leaders seem to lack the spine that some of their predecessors from a generation or two ago showed in the face of hostility.
Indeed, and one that Google conveniently no longer needs to make in light of this privacy policy, since it looks like they can now sell their users' data too.
Unfortunately, their explanation seems to be perfectly clear. As you say, it includes no restrictions on use nor any guarantee of any sort security whatsoever. I expect that the objecting privacy advocates are thinking much the same thing as me: it is implausible that an organisation like Google, which has an army of lawyers and just pushed through a fairly controversial change to its privacy policies elsewhere a few weeks ago, claimed these extra powers anything other than deliberately.
FWIW, if I were a betting man I would bet that the licence probably would stand up, at least if someone had already acquired a copy of the code before the original author changed their mind and with the understanding that it was licensed in that way. Others have posted at least one credible argument to that effect in their comments elsewhere in this thread.
All I'm really saying here is that it's not silly to question that assumption in an area that is as much a legal minefield as copyright, if there are no hard and fast statute rules or clear precedents from case law to give guidance on how a real court will interpret the law in any given jurisdiction.
You referred to the GPL as a contract, when it's not, it's a license.
No, I didn't. In fact, in my very first post to this thread, I explicitly raised the question of how the licence was granted, and in at least two posts now I have explicitly mentioned two possible mechanisms: contract and deed.
You supposed a fictional situation in which an upstream GPL license grantor attempts to revoke their license unilaterally outside of the allowed perpetual scope of the license's own termination clauses, declaring that "the case law is highly lacking," intending to create drama, and I am the troll?
No, actually, that was the position of an AC (who was not me). All I've done was defend the position that it's unwise to make blanket assumptions about intricate legal matters if there's no clear statute or case law to support those assumptions, and suggest reasons that this is in fact an intricate legal matter that should not be so casually dismissed. Of course, given that you guys don't seem confident about legal fundamentals like what kind of status a software licence like the GPL has, I'd say it's already clear that this is not a trivial legal question.
Everything else you're apparently objecting to is stuff you are reading into my posts that was never there.
You're free to believe whatever you wish. I have no interest in participating in a discussion where people are going to lie for no apparent reason, nor in advancing any particular agenda here. I'm just a guy defending another guy whose point I thought was unfairly attacked.
Right now, the only falsifiable claim that I can see anyone on my side of the argument has made is that there is little or no case law to back up the assumption that retrospectively rescinding a licence is impossible. If anyone disagrees, they don't need letters after their name or quotes from their lawyer, they just need to cite the statute or ruling that the rest of us don't know about.
Likewise, the only substantial questions I've posed in this discussion are what the legal status of a GPL licence agreement is, and whether a non-tangible thing like a promise to behave in a certain way would, under all circumstances and without any doubt, constitute consideration if the answer to the first question is "a contract".
Given that no-one has given any such citation or given a clear answer to my two questions, and yet everyone is busy attacking the messengers instead, what does that tell us?
Slashdot Mirror
I understand your argument, but I very much doubt that it would fly in court.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to argue that anything should "fly in court". All I was trying to explain originally is that I don't think Google should get a free pass compared to Microsoft just because they don't use proprietary file formats in predatory way, because when you're talking about cloud services there are (possibly natural rather than deliberate) barriers to competition that effectively create similar momentum anyway.
I do also happen to think that Google's position is dominant in several markets today, and as such they are getting into legal monopoly territory, and as such they are at risk of being considered anti-competitive if they don't tread very carefully. But as you say, each of those points is distinct and doesn't automatically follow from the one before. In this thread, all I'm saying is that the OP's comments way back at the beginning were an apples-to-oranges comparison and don't preclude the possibility of a similar monopoly abuse situation either.
Or maybe I just have a different opinion to you. Apparently my views in this thread are controversial, but obviously I'm not the only one to hold them: there have been both considered replies and positive moderations of several of my posts, as well as the critics.
I would point out (yet again) that most of the people writing critical responses aren't actually addressing the point I've been trying to make anyway, they're attacking some vaguely related strawman. The fact is that no-one has commented in detail on the two specific cases I mentioned right back in my very first post to this thread: transferring data not just out of Google Docs but also into a competing on-line service, and transferring data not just out of Google Mail but also into a competing service (specifically, Hotmail). The best I've had is lots of claims that I must be [insert insult here] because I don't know how easy it is to get data out of Google's software (a position I never opposed or challenged, but which doesn't contradict my original point).
Still, at least the people who want an argument now seem to have nothing left except calling me names like "professional Google hater" (despite repeated and explicit comments throughout this discussion that I'm not criticising Google, I'm merely pointing out that in practice they currently have a dominant position in several markets) and "shill" (for who, exactly?).
John and Jane would ask me/you/another geek how to do it and I would show them.
They could do that. Most of them won't do that. And since we're talking about monopolies, it's the actual market share we should look at first, not the theoretical possibility that people could move. People could theoretically have moved from PCs running Windows to Apple gear running MacOS, or for that matter could have downloaded another browser instead of sticking with IE, but most of them didn't.
What do you think Google should do?
I don't think that Google should do anything. I think Google's position on its mail service and the facilities it provides to let people download their mail are exemplary. This does not change the fact that right now they have a large market share.
Is Safari a Google product? No. Are Apple likely to help Google become dominant? LOL.
Hang on, you're moving the goalposts again. The concern here was about whether WebKit-specific extensions could potentially become so common that other browsers had a competitive disadvantage by not supporting them, much as IE6 once did. It's not a Google vs. Apple issue.
Don't try to wave the "I'm an IT professional" shite at me. I'm an IT professional too, with probably a great deal more experience than you.
I have no interest in going down this path with you. I didn't wave anything like that at you. I commented on two specific points, where I believed based entirely on what you have written here and I continue to believe that either your understanding of the reality is wrong or you're not understanding the points I'm trying to make.
One final time, and then I'm giving up: Google do, in practice, have a dominant position in several potentially related markets. Whether or not they are behaving in any way inappropriately in terms of locking people in, this potentially gives them monopoly status. This is a matter of statute law, and one judge's findings in one particular case in one particular jurisdiction do not limit the scope of the issue, even if it was a very significant case at the time. Google are also in a position where some of the technologies they support that are not industry-wide standards could become de facto standards just as various Microsoft technologies did back in the day. Again, there is nothing inherently illegal about that, but the potential consequences are similar. If Google use their current dominant position in certain markets to unfairly promote those technologies they favour in other markets, that is where the legal problems start for them.
There are some issues with this approach, but it's certainly far more democratic then various representative democratic systems we currently have in the West.
The question, of course, is whether we really want a true democracy.
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." -- Winston Churchill
If you could have an idealised system where (a) anyone who cared enough to get properly informed on an issue and develop a considered opinion had earned the right to vote on that issue, (b) any time an issue required significant debate there was magically a freely available forum to host that debate, and (c) enough money grew on trees to pay for anyone interested in a particular subject to spend their time getting informed and debating about it before voting, then sure, I could buy into that.
In practice, since we can never have such a system, I think some form of representative democracy is the best we can achieve. However, we could do a lot better than we do in most places today at keeping those representatives honest. We could start by mandating a right to force a referendum on any single issue, removing the problem where someone who the population mostly agree with can push through other measures once elected even if the population as a whole is strongly opposed to those measures, for example because it gains the representative favour with powerful special interests. Then introduce a power of recall, removing the problem that politicians only need to care about the people they supposedly represent within a memory span of an election cycle, and we'd really be getting somewhere.
If you're going to take advantage of modern technology's ability to organise mass consultation far more easily and cheaply than before, I would suggest measures like these rather than anything resembling literal direct democracy on all matters. Use the Internet to run a consultation day, perhaps annually or even semiannually, so that the elected representatives still have a reasonable period of time to explore an issue and propose their response, but the general population can contribute to or even override big decisions frequently enough that they can't be ignored.
Sure, Facebook are trying to spy on everyone everywhere. They just don't actually run ads on sites other than their own is what I'm saying, at least not in the way that Google does.
In theory, yes you can. In practice, with the major providers today, the Web is full of people complaining that it doesn't work in the Google -> Hotmail case I mentioned when you have lots of data, as obviously a lot of people do with an e-mail archive.
I am now repeating this every post because so many people (though not the parent poster) keep replying to half of what I've written and ignoring the context: I am not accusing Google of being sneaky or trying to lock up data through technical means here. I am simply observing, in response to someone else's original point about file formats, that Google don't need to rely on proprietary file formats or other lock-in techniques to keep people hooked if in practice most people aren't going to be able to shift their data to a competing service anyway. You don't get exempted from monopoly status just because of a theoretical ability for your users to switch to a competitor, if in practice you still hold the dominant market share.
Look here. Not exactlly hard is it.
That comment alone sums up almost all of the replies to my original comments. To a geek using Slashdot, no, it's not hard to shift the data around. But if you think John and Jane down the road are going to have the slightest idea about how to follow those instructions and the confidence to actually do it, I think you need to spend a bit more time in front line customer support at an ISP.
As I keep saying, it isn't Google's fault, and they aren't being unreasonable, but that doesn't matter. The point is that they don't need to use proprietary technologies to lock people in if in practice most people won't manage to switch anyway.
Webkit is not without competition even on mobile devices
You also need to spend a bit more time as a developer of web sites aimed at mobile devices. Safari is utterly dominant on iOS devices. Chrome is utterly dominant on Android devices. Everything else is noise. It is possible that this will change with the arrival of Windows 8 and a new version of IE both aimed squarely at the mobile device market, but right now that is the reality. Firefox is a blip. IE is a blip. Whatever BlackBerry are running this week is a blip, albeit one with occasional spikes on B2B sites. Safari and Chrome are dominant, utterly.
I haven't glossed over SPDY at all but looking at it it appears to be an attempt at a replacement for HTTP and TCP. I don't see the one Google web server to rule them all anywhere.
No-one saw IE6 becoming one browser to rule them all either, until it won enough market share that people started using IE6-only features, which in turn became a liability a few years later as other browsers started trying to compete seriously again. This is a prime example where Google are influential enough in multiple markets (in this case, browser software and on-line applications) to push through their own standards at the expense of others.
Do you actually expect Google to make their system export in every possible format to every online suite on the internet?
No, of course not. Google are under no legal obligation to provide any sort of export facility at all, as far as I'm aware.
However, I cannot help but notice the irony here: I am challenging a claim -- that Google is somehow less monopolistic than Microsoft were because Google aren't relying on proprietary file formats in the same way -- and I am being criticised in part on the basis that Google can export the data in the very same proprietary format that was apparently grounds for attacking Microsoft originally!
What other Webmail service provides an easy "transfer my stuff to Gmail" feature? IMAP and POP3 are the standard ways to transfer email, and Gmail offering those is better than the other services already!
IMAP and POP are protocols that a lot of people using Google Mail have never even heard of, because one of the major advantages of signing up for hosted webmail is that you don't have to configure this sort of stuff.
It's great that Google Mail lets you download your stuff to archive it or whatever, really it is. But if you (meaning "an average user", not you personally) can't easily transfer your data to a rival service, using those protocols or otherwise, then there is a barrier to competition.
Please understand that it doesn't matter whose fault this is, and that I'm not blaming Google as if they're somehow letting the side down. I'm simply arguing that such a barrier exists, and is the modern cloud-based equivalent of everyone's software using their own proprietary file formats in the old days.
That in turn makes it difficult to move between competing services, and that gives an advantage to whoever has the lion's share of the market at any given time, and that means they have a mechanism they can lever to their advantage in other markets, and fundamentally that is what this whole discussion is about. It's not an opinion or a criticism, it's simply the way things are, just as being a monopoly is not illegal, but it does activate a different set of rules to prevent the abuse of that dominant position.
It's not lock-in, it's lock-out.
It may well be. I've never claimed otherwise, despite some respondents apparently reading things into my posts that were not there.
But it doesn't matter. The question was whether Google use locked-in proprietary formats in the way Microsoft used to. My point is that it doesn't matter, because as long as there are barriers to easy competition, and regardless of whose fault those barriers may be, Google get the benefits in terms of retention-by-default without need Microsoft-esque tricks to bolster their position.
Exporting Google Mail isn't terribly difficult. Microsoft allowing you to import it has nothing to do with Google.
Well, sure, and saving a Word document isn't terribly difficult. OpenOffice importing it all correctly has nothing to do with Microsoft.
Of course it's not that simple because you get into questions of how open the formats used are and so on. But your argument is weak as it stands.
Putting their stuff in their browser when they have 2 other major competitors has nothing on driving all other browsers out of the market and imposing a non-standard browser that set the web back a few years.
Except that on mobile devices, WebKit is already the only serious game in town, and on Windows Chrome's market share is rising rapidly while Firefox stagnates and IE drops like a stone. It is entirely conceivable that at currents rates Chrome will not have "2 other major competitors" within a couple of years, and web developers will be treating the numerous Chrome- (or at least WebKit-) specific features as standardised, just like they did with IE6 after Netscape lost.
WebM - lol you are clutching at straws aren't you. WebM has failed miserably to unseat h264
I notice that you glossed over SPDY there, and indeed over my more general point that Google are quite happy to propose entire new standards if they don't like the ones that are already there. It's not so much "embrace and extend" as "ignore and replace" in that case, but the end result is the same.
Once again, I'm not saying these proposed replacements are bad. On the contrary, there are solid technical arguments in their favour in many cases. I'm just pointing out that this is the same path that we followed before.
Google docs: File -> Download as -> Word, ODT, RDF, PDF, Text, HTML (Zipped)
I didn't ask whether you could download it as a Word DOC, I asked whether you could transfer it into another on-line office suite -- in other words, a direct competitor to Google Docs. And the short answer is no, at least not without converting via an intermediate format such as those you mentioned.
And Gmail support both POP3 and IMAP.. What else do you need?
Yes, I get it. You can download your mail, assuming you have some suitable tool that can then use it in that format.
But this doesn't help unless other competing tools actually can use it. Since you typically can't upload an entire existing mail archive to the major hosted webmail providers, it doesn't matter if you can download it from whichever one you picked first, you're still effectively locked in and there is a significant barrier to competition.
You can certainly argue that if the download lets you get some sort of standard mail archive but the other service doesn't support uploading that standard format then it's the receiving service's fault, but what is the standard format for downloading an entire archive from a hosted webmail service? Maybe with some combinations you can set up the receiving system to fetch everything via POP or IMAP from the originating system without ever downloading it locally, but how many people would even understand what that means, and how many of the major webmail providers allow this in practice?
Please remember that my fundamental point here is not to accuse Google of using proprietary formats, it's that Google don't need to use proprietary formats to achieve the same kind of lock-in if, in practice, most of their users can't figure out how to get their data into a competing service anyway.
Are Google enforcing proprietary formats
I don't know what you mean by "enforcing", but I suspect you're asking the wrong question.
When you host all your users' data anyway, as Google services typically do, it doesn't matter all that much what format you're using to store the data internally. What matters is whether your users can readily get access to their own data and interoperate with other products/services that use that data.
Have you ever tried to get a document or spreadsheet out of Google Docs and into one of the other on-line office suites? How about exporting your entire Google Mail archive and importing it into Hotmail?
bundling products to the detriment of their competition
Well, their entire network of services just changed its privacy policy to allow them to share data everywhere, and their advertising is targeted based on the data they are collecting on all those other services, which sounds a lot like bundling services to me. I don't know about "to the detriment of their competition", because who is the serious competition to Google Ads? Even the mighty Facebook, who has a somewhat similar MO, don't run an advertising network that is widely used on other web sites.
and 'reinterpreting' standards such that third party options no longer interoperate properly?
Apart from the numerous extensions and proprietary features going into their browser, exactly like what Microsoft and Netscape did back in the day? And violating assorted technical standards for serving web sites in the interests of getting faster performance for their page loads? And then there's things like SPDY and WebM.
Of course, you could reasonably argue that this is digital evolution in action and will make the Internet a better place in the long run, but then you could have made a reasonable argument that Microsoft Office and IE6 initially won their long-term dominance by being better than their competition in much the same way. At the time they won, they were great products, too. The stagnation and ultimately the legacy burden only comes later, when there's nothing left to offer credible competition and drive innovation in the market.
Google is not yet in Microsoft's league of indecency. Microsoft, just to remind you, is a convicted abusive monopolist. Google has not reached monopoly status anywhere significant.
Google is probably at least as dominant in several on-line fields as Microsoft ever was: search (traditional Google), video hosting (YouTube), and mapping/geographical data (Google Maps) come immediately to mind. I don't know how dominant Google Mail is as a hosted webmail provider these days, but that might be a candidate too. And then there are all kinds of smaller/niche areas where Google has been developing and/or buying up early players, though the trend does seem to be much more about consolidation and focus since the change in leadership.
On top of that range of dominant services, there is far more potential for Google to use leverage from an existing dominant service to further its efforts artificially in another market, with the on-line advertising where it makes its real money being a prime example.
So I think you're objectively incorrect that Google is not yet in the same league as Microsoft were. They are actually some way beyond where Microsoft had got to, it's just that no-one has called them on it in court yet. That could simply be because there is no-one left to compete credibly and no-one new brave/foolish enough to try to disrupt a market where Google is already the dominant player, which is in practice almost the definition of a monopoly.
That's an interesting theory. It will be even more interesting to see whether it survives the French presidential election and the next major round of elections in Germany. If M. Hollande wins the presidency and makes good on his position to renegotiate the current agreements on European finances, that could be serious political trouble for Frau Merkel, who is already facing an uphill struggle at the next election. If she fails to win another term, the two big powerhouses who have driven the austerity agenda will be gone.
If that happened, they would almost certainly have been replaced by politicians far more willing to tell Big Finance where to go, if that meant they could still put food on family dining tables and books children's schools. This would no doubt worry the international community and put a dampener on future investment, but ironically there is a variation of the too-big-to-fail argument that applies to Europe as a whole: even if several countries in Europe do renege on many of their debts, we're still talking about one of the biggest markets in the first world, and if the developing economies want to keep growing at anything close to their current pace, they're going to have to trade with Europe one way or another. Sure, they might always do it with one eye on their bank accounts and the other on the trustworthy faces of European governments, but the alternative is that Europe just sits there and stagnates for -- well, who knows how long for? -- and that doesn't help either Europe itself or any of its potential trading partners.
At some point, you have to admit that the entire system was screwed up, and the best thing to do is to knock it down and build it again. Economically, there is debate about whether we have reached that point and must accept the downsides of a write-off. Politically, a change of direction in the French and German governments could render the economics a moot point.
You get copyright by default in any nation that is a signatory to the major international treaties, which is almost everywhere that is relevant to a discussion about starting tech companies. This has been the case for quite a few years now.
The question of whether that copyright prevents someone else from doing something is much more interesting, because it depends on the local exceptions that are permitted, which do vary significantly from place to place.
So, unless you want to undo almost a century of globalization, this will affect legal software worldwide, unless and until copyright laws can be amended to more sane terms.
Fortunately, that is not even close to true.
Firstly, as a matter of objective fact, there are significant discrepancies in the scope of local copyright laws in different jurisdictions, and ultimately that local law is what is going to matter in any given lawsuit. For example, in the United States, the rules for protecting the design of fonts are looser than anywhere else I know because of a specific provision. That doesn't negate the copyright on font designs elsewhere, but neither does it mean the US is going to close down all the people making cloned fonts with the blessing of a specific provision of US law.
Secondly, the major international copyright treaties explicitly allow for limitations and exceptions to copyright law that vary from country to country. For example, the United States actually has far more lenient fair use provisions than most places. Whether this is compatible with the three step test under the Berne Convention etc. is the subject of considerable debate, and such a broad and generic exception is not found on the statute books in most other western jurisdictions, but that doesn't mean things the US considers fair use are illegal if somewhere else doesn't choose to incorporate the same exception into their own law.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, plenty of countries, including the United States, have demonstrably been willing to screw the rules in the international copyright treaties and/or apply leverage based on other unrelated international agreements to further their own national interests on numerous occasions. If the US tried to enforce any such law internationally based on treaty obligations, I expect it would find itself subject to ridicule long before it found everyone else subject to its absurd precedent.
Tell me, Mr Anderson: What good is a carrier battle group, if you are unable to afford ammunition?
This is serious, guys.
It's really not, for precisely the reasons you gave.
If this case were to go in Oracle's favour and if it were then allowed to set a precedent, the US software industry would be seriously damaged by legal infighting for a years to come. Even if a few large businesses on the scale of Google and Oracle could survive, in the same way that they play the patent pooling game to neutralise that threat from other big business while still screwing small businesses, innovation would die almost overnight and the next big software businesses would all be based outside the US. As the rest of the world looked on, bemused by the litigious culture of US business finally imploding, the total US economy would take a noticeable hit, Silicon Valley would become a historical footnote as investors fled to tech hubs in other jurisdictions, etc.
And so, if this were allowed to stand, it would suck for Google for about ten minutes, and then lobbyists backed by more money than has been printed in the history of humanity would descend on Washington and buy legislation to trump the court case and fix the problem.
Personally I find GMail to be particularly shady, because it's not only scanning the user's personal mail, it's also inherently scanning someone else's personal mail, and the other party/parties might not even realise that Google is involved in any way. Rather like Facebook's shadow profiles and getting friends to volunteer information about each other than the individuals chose not to provide themselves, there's something very dubious about Google using a database of e-mail correspondance without all of the parties agreeing to it.
As for Drive, I don't see anything in the terms that actually restricts Google to the kind of behaviour you described, for example requiring them to respect any privacy settings you might have chosen, and I suspect that's why some people are concerned about the privacy implications.
Unfortunately we seem to be following a similar path in Britain, and wider Europe, as well these days. There is still some degree of political opposition to over-reaching security provisions that conflict with civil liberties here, more so than in the US it seems, but we have the virtual strip search machines at airports and we send passenger data to US authorities and we see repeated efforts to install systematic spyware and censorship tools into communications networks and so on.
I'm hopeful that clearer heads will prevail and public sentiment will turn against the unbalanced policy before it becomes too deeply entrenched, but alas our political leaders seem to lack the spine that some of their predecessors from a generation or two ago showed in the face of hostility.
A subtle, but important, distinction.
Indeed, and one that Google conveniently no longer needs to make in light of this privacy policy, since it looks like they can now sell their users' data too.
They need to explain it better/more fully.
Unfortunately, their explanation seems to be perfectly clear. As you say, it includes no restrictions on use nor any guarantee of any sort security whatsoever. I expect that the objecting privacy advocates are thinking much the same thing as me: it is implausible that an organisation like Google, which has an army of lawyers and just pushed through a fairly controversial change to its privacy policies elsewhere a few weeks ago, claimed these extra powers anything other than deliberately.
FWIW, if I were a betting man I would bet that the licence probably would stand up, at least if someone had already acquired a copy of the code before the original author changed their mind and with the understanding that it was licensed in that way. Others have posted at least one credible argument to that effect in their comments elsewhere in this thread.
All I'm really saying here is that it's not silly to question that assumption in an area that is as much a legal minefield as copyright, if there are no hard and fast statute rules or clear precedents from case law to give guidance on how a real court will interpret the law in any given jurisdiction.
You referred to the GPL as a contract, when it's not, it's a license.
No, I didn't. In fact, in my very first post to this thread, I explicitly raised the question of how the licence was granted, and in at least two posts now I have explicitly mentioned two possible mechanisms: contract and deed.
You supposed a fictional situation in which an upstream GPL license grantor attempts to revoke their license unilaterally outside of the allowed perpetual scope of the license's own termination clauses, declaring that "the case law is highly lacking," intending to create drama, and I am the troll?
No, actually, that was the position of an AC (who was not me). All I've done was defend the position that it's unwise to make blanket assumptions about intricate legal matters if there's no clear statute or case law to support those assumptions, and suggest reasons that this is in fact an intricate legal matter that should not be so casually dismissed. Of course, given that you guys don't seem confident about legal fundamentals like what kind of status a software licence like the GPL has, I'd say it's already clear that this is not a trivial legal question.
Everything else you're apparently objecting to is stuff you are reading into my posts that was never there.
You're free to believe whatever you wish. I have no interest in participating in a discussion where people are going to lie for no apparent reason, nor in advancing any particular agenda here. I'm just a guy defending another guy whose point I thought was unfairly attacked.
Right now, the only falsifiable claim that I can see anyone on my side of the argument has made is that there is little or no case law to back up the assumption that retrospectively rescinding a licence is impossible. If anyone disagrees, they don't need letters after their name or quotes from their lawyer, they just need to cite the statute or ruling that the rest of us don't know about.
Likewise, the only substantial questions I've posed in this discussion are what the legal status of a GPL licence agreement is, and whether a non-tangible thing like a promise to behave in a certain way would, under all circumstances and without any doubt, constitute consideration if the answer to the first question is "a contract".
Given that no-one has given any such citation or given a clear answer to my two questions, and yet everyone is busy attacking the messengers instead, what does that tell us?